1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a hot-plug technology, and more particularly, a hot-plug control system and method which could be applied to different kinds of computer devices to implement a PCI-E hot-plug function.
2. Description of Related Art
Modern computer devices usually interface peripheral devices to upgrade or update functions or add new functions. To drive a peripheral device, computer devices often need to be restarted and current operations need to be stopped, thereby resulting in complication and inconvenience and even resulting in data loss and service interruption of servers that require time continuity and high reliability.
Accordingly, a PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnection) technology providing hot-plug function is proposed, which has become a universal bus standard of computer devices. The PCI technology is an interconnection mechanism specially designed for highly integrated peripheral devices, expansion boards and processor/memory systems, which could connect various kinds of expansion cards, hard disks or optical disc drives with a computer system and implement bidirectional communications between those devices, system memory and processor. By using the PCI technology, PCI devices could be upgraded, updated or added without the need of shutting down or pausing computer devices, thereby greatly reducing planned or unplanned downtime and improving the performance of computer devices.
However, with further development and application expansion of the computer technology, the PCI bandwidth gradually becomes a bottleneck. The PCI technology could maximally provide a theoretical bandwidth of 1.056 Gbps. On the other hand, a network card requires a bandwidth of 1 Gbps, that is, 95% bandwidth of the PCI bus is occupied by the network card. This leaves little room for any other peripheral devices to use. In many circumstances, only one sound card is being used on the PCI bus, if other bandwidth-demanding peripheral devices are added, a part of the bandwidth used by the network card will be allocated to the devices. Consequently, the network speed will be influenced to some degree.
Thus, a PCI-Express (PCI-E) hot-plug technology is proposed by Intel Inc. to replace the PCI hot-plug technology. The main frequency of computer devices using PCI-Express hot-plug technology could reach 2.5 GHz and the data transfer rate is also increased a lot.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a PCI-E hot-plug system proposed by Intel Inc. As shown in FIG. 1, a computer device 4 has a CPU (Central Process Unit) 40, a MCH (Memory Controller Hub) chip 42 and an ICH (Input/Output Controller Hub) chip 44, wherein the MCH chip 42 is provided with a hot-plug controller 420. A PCI-E hot-plug construction 5 includes a plurality of insertion slots 50, a PCI-E bus 52 electrically connecting the MCH chip 42 with the slots 50, a power control unit 54 and an interrupt signal generation module 56 for generating interrupt signals, wherein the interrupt signal generation module 56 could be a PCA9555. Each of the slots 50 includes a power button (not shown) and an indicator light 502 to indicate the work status of the slots 50. The PCI-E hot-plug function is implemented as follows: first, an interrupt signal is generated by the interrupt signal generation module 56; then, the interrupt signal is sent to the hot-plug controller 420; subsequently, the hot-plug controller 420 detects the hot-plug operation on the slots 50, according to which the power control unit 54 controls the power of the slot 50; finally, the driver is loaded to implement the PCI-E hot-plug function.
Compared with the PCI technology of the prior art, the PCI-E hot-plug technology is simpler, faster and has a much wider bandwidth.
However, the PCI-E hot-plug technology can only be applied to a computer device that is provided with a specialized PCI-E hot-plug control chip produced by Intel Inc. while it is impossible for other computer devices such as those produced by the AMD Inc. to use the PCI-E hot-plug technology, thereby limiting the application of the PCI-E hot-plug technology.